


Good Things, Bad People

by fenrisian



Category: Shadowrun: Dragonfall
Genre: Gen, POV Minor Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 19:16:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16793113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenrisian/pseuds/fenrisian
Summary: How do you deal with being the butt of the Universe's joke, and the pawn in someone else's game?  When the simple job you thought would make you a bit of extra Nuyen on the side turns into a nightmare that turns you squarely into a criminal, where exactly are you supposed to go from there?Or, what Jana did next.





	Good Things, Bad People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violeteyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violeteyes/gifts).



> For the request: "Proceeding from the timeline where the mission is a success and she's able to get home to her boyfriend and her cat, I'm looking for a story where we learn how Jana handles her life after discovering she'd been used to plant the explosives to assassinate a corporate big cheese. Does she do her best to mitigate her guilt with ice cream and the boyfriend? Does she find herself contacted by the Lodge again? Does she begin to run the shadows on her own terms? Ball's in your court, chummer."
> 
> Have a great holiday season, friend.

Gareth is in between jobs. It’s not his fault, and when she says that she does actually mean it. It’s also not necessarily a bad thing. He’s a consultant programmer with a specialization in HoloLISP, and his last project came to an end two weeks ago. There isn’t another one yet, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be. For a guy like him there’s always work somewhere.

But right now he’s in her apartment, pottering around in his slacks, chatting about this and that, the rates he might get if he goes corporate versus the freedom of design you get with the little mom and pop businesses. He won’t go corporate, he never does, and privately she’s always thought it has more to do with fear of failure than it does freedom of expression. But he likes to pretend that he could if he wanted to, that he might if he had to lower his standards and become just another cog in the great machine. The corps pay better than ol’ mom and pop do, but they’ll also eat you alive if you get it wrong.

She had thought, sitting there in the night as the train had sped her away from the scene of devastation unfolding grim and relentless behind, that she would go back home, she’d collapse in his arms and he’d hold her, he’d say something to make it all right. His normalcy, his gentle ranting would carry them through. He’s a good man, even if he can be a flake sometimes.

But Gareth is still talking about the difference between the oily corporate gloss of dead dreams and the authenticity of the smaller business setups, and he doesn’t notice. He does not notice. She watches him pace, reaches out and accepts the mug of soykaf he hands her, and gives a vague nod when he asks if she minds watching the end of that holodoc he hasn’t finished or if she’d prefer to start that new trid-series they’ve been thinking of trying.

She had thought she’d come home and fall into his arms, tell him everything, protest that she’d not known, she’d never meant for any of this. But she doesn’t. There’s just no right time to say something like “I killed a man last night.”

In the end they watch the trid-series. It’s just as awful as she’d thought it would be.

  


*

  


Of course he’d not been there when she got back. The cat had. Jana had knelt down in the middle of her kitchen-diner and held Meeki so tightly the animal had dug its claws in to make her let go. Then she’d cried, big ugly tears that left her unable to breathe through the snot in her nose because she’s _not_ a murderer, she’s just an electrician and she’d never asked for this, for any of it.

4am and Gareth was clearly not coming home. Self-pity had given way then to anger. Jana’s apartment is in line with her pay packet and therefore not large, but over the years she’s amassed the usual clutter of a life and that meant there had been plenty of things to hand. Pacing had quickly turned to yelling and throwing things which had sent Meeki cowering into the bathroom cubicle and that had made her guilty all over again.

She’d hugged the cat, tidied up the mess of broken plant pot, setting straight the shoes and boxes that had fallen prey to her rage, bribed the wariness out of Meeki’s cautious glare with kitty treats, and sat down in the ringing silence of her apartment to wait for her boyfriend to come home.

Eventually the cat had come over to join her, and together they’d seen the morning in.

  


*

He notices four weeks later. At least, that’s when he mentions it anyway.

It’s breakfast and he’s looking at her with narrowed eyes and furrowed brow, over the rim of his mug of soykaf. Jana only really notices he’s watching her when he speaks, despite the fact he’s been pantomiming the action for the past five minutes.

“Everything okay?”

She looks at him, taking in the concern in his eyes and the slight hint of a warning that’s hiding there. She recognizes this look - it’s the one that usually precedes a _talk._

“Sure, yeah. I mean, why do you ask?”

He puts the mug down, giving her that weirdly paternal look that she’s come to associate with him trying to act like what he’s going to say isn’t going to piss her off but is in fact in her best interests.

“You just seem...quiet these days.”

“Oh, right. I’m sorry. Work’s been, wow. You know.” She blows a strand of hair out of her mouth and smiles. Everything is fine, right? He doesn’t give up, because of course he doesn’t.

“It’s just that, Jana honey, you seem like you’re not into this any more. Like, I don’t know. You’re not as fun any more.”

You’re not as fun. You’re not as fragging _f_ _un?_

She stares at him, too astounded to say anything, too hurt really. _Not as fun._

Gareth can be a selfish bastard sometimes, just like anyone, but he is handsome. Long blond hair, green eyes, all the things she likes. Not as _fun._

“I uh, what do you mean?” she asks, because hurt or not, confrontation isn't really her style. She likes things to be simple, doesn't like to fight. They’d been getting along fine, hadn't they?

He shrugs, offers her that smile he knows always wins her over. “I just mean you don’t seem to be present any more, like your head’s somewhere else. I mean, any other guy might think there was someone else, you know?”

“There’s no-one else,” she replies. Because there isn’t, of course there isn’t. There’s just her and the echoing memory of what it had felt like there on the platform with the resounding crack-boom of fire and shattered glass tearing up the night behind her. A shockwave of percussive sound and mute incomprehension.

“I’m sorry, I’m just tired, that’s all,” she says.

“Okay,” he replies. “Just- you know, you can talk to me, right?”

“Right! Sure.”

They leave it at that. Jana goes out to work and he settles down to watch the trid before browsing for new contracts.

  


*

She dumps him a week later. Probably should have taken more time to think about it, but life’s short, isn’t it? Life’s really short, especially when some bastard cuts it short for you.

She cries.

*

  


But it comes back to her on her way to a job - a real job, a _nice_ job, a normal job - when she turns round to find a Knight Errant Enforcer at her shoulder and smoothly engages him in conversation, just how well she can do this sort of thing. She’s slick actually, even if she says so herself. The guy's not even there to stop her because she’s not doing anything wrong, _really_ not doing anything wrong this time, he’s just there because he’s interested.

Actually, no. Not even interested. That strange state that mixes up bored and on-duty and not averse to company. Perhaps she should have been intimidated by the buzz of his vox magnifier, or the expensive armor and death-incarnate gun he carries loosely in his gloved hands, but she’s not. Wrong again, she _is_ intimidated, _but_ she can deal with him. (Even if he’s a walking death machine, one wrong move and he’ll blow your brains out, citizen.)

But _they_ must have died too, mustn’t they? She knows that even their armor can’t stop an explosion that’s hot enough to take out an entire floor. It doesn’t stop a bullet if you aim right. God, she’s sick to even think that. She hopes they died quickly.

She lets her eyes wander over the sleek curves of his armor and across the military grade weaponry he’s sporting. You’d have to be mad or desperate to go up against one of these guys. Or trapped and tricked into it. You’d end up in cuffs, or thrown in jail, or far more likely you’d just end up dead. No messing around with people like this, never a second chance.

Still, she’d held her own, hadn't she?

  


*

Graham calls at 2am. It’s not that late if you don’t have a job to get to the next day, but he’s drunk and he’s crying and that’s far more than she wants to deal with right now. He needs her. They need to get back together. To sort things out. To be how they used to be.

(He probably just needs her money, she thinks as she listens. The Lodge pays well if nothing else. Well enough. For killing people.)

She listens and doesn’t say anything.

Eventually she puts the phone down and then turns it off.

She’s done with that.

  


*

  


For a short time she’d thought maybe she could try God, but there’s so many to choose from and why would any of them forgive? I mean, really. You want to believe there’s a reason for everything, don’t you? It makes it seem like there’s some kind of control even amidst the madness, like the choices you make actually might matter, even if it’s only because someone, some _thing_ out there bears witness and marks down the injustices. Someone to be on your side.

But she’s not naive, she knows bad things happen to good people. Corporations happen. Shit luck happens. That had gone both ways, hadn’t it - shit for the suits and shit for her.

Shit for that stupid foreign elf with his pretty voice and wild eyes. Pretty, if you liked that sort of thing of course. She doesn’t, and it’s a good job too because he hadn’t lasted long once the pressure had come to bear.

Still, she goes downtown one evening when the thin rain that’s falling turns the pavements to liquid gold in the glow of the streetlights, to the place where there’s a gathering of local churches, like a patch of mushrooms all sprung up together. She stands for a while in the light of their neon signs and wonders which one holds God. Any god, for real. Eventually she picks one that’s dedicated to something urban modern, all clean lines from the pleasantly upholstered wooden pews to the deliberately humble-looking pulpit. There’s a simplicity to the place that seeks to call back to the old days of organized religion when the miracles were still in the books and the heart and not out there walking the streets dripping fire and hexing the security cameras. And then she walks out again. So fast the rain hasn’t even had time to stop puttering down, filling the air with its chill and its mundanity.

No god in there. No god in any of them maybe, at least, not one that has the authority to forgive her sins. Besides, her mama had always said god’s in the doing.

So she goes home. When she gets in dripping wet and refreshed in a way she hasn’t felt in weeks she finds the cat coughing in the middle of the kitchen, puking up blood and sick. It takes nearly an entire roll of kitchen paper to clean it all up, and by the time she’s done the cat is huddled miserably on the couch, watching her from above its neatly folded paws. She stares at its soft little body, a tiny soul wrapped up in fur and bone, one that’s sat on her lap and shared her home for longer than any man has. It doesn’t understand a damned thing of what’s going on.

Good things happen to bad people.

  


*

The phone rings again, and this time when she picks up the person on the other end says her name before she even has time to speak. It’s the Lodge _fixer_ , because that’s what he is really isn’t he? The man who gives out the best jobs, the ones that get whispered about because they pay so damned well, even if no-one will really say what they’re for. She recognizes his voice immediately, even though he doesn’t give his name.

“I have some work for you. Are you interested?”

She thinks about the fire - intense enough to melt glass the news had said. She remembers the way the ground had shivered beneath her when the blast had gone off, and the cold punch of understanding that had hit her of what they’d really done. How it had felt like every drop of blood in her body had drained down to her feet leaving her cold and so light she might have floated away into the dark then and there. She thinks of the money in her bank account. She thinks of Graham, head in a holo-stim, probably drunk somewhere. The cat needs pills.

She’d held her own though, hadn’t she?

“Yes,” she says. “I am.”


End file.
